4) Transcendence: Is It Culturally Shaped or Is "There Something" Universal?

Abstract "Reflections on Taoist Views of “Other Minds”: Toward A Theory of Anti-Culture!" Constantine Hriskos, Ph.D. and Hong Zhanq, Ph.D. Colby College, Waterville, Maine. For more information on this conference go to http://www.sacaaa.org

Taoists texts contain many asides on the problems of relativity and certainty, our perceptions and judgments of the world. A kind of dialectical view of consciousness is presented, a non-alienated consciousness that, while not being at odds with any particular culture tends to diffuse into the world at large. Diffusion's of the cycles of nature, the wonders of the endless transformations of one thing into another, which critique the arbitrary boundary lines that represent the individual self, the other, and their pretensions--i.e., aspects of "cultural discourse" for the anthropologist. For anthropologists in our day ALL this is SIMPLY the province of culture. They eschew the Taoist notion of an non-objectifiable nature revolving kaleidoscopically on the axis of endless possibilities of which humans, culture, and consciousness themselves are fleeting patterns. Anthropologists balk at the premise that the world is anything but a particular cultural concept or discursive practice or set of practices--or simply the ORDER-ing of THINGS as per Focault. And the denial that Nature stands within and without humans, that it can be known, or that it might itself be aware. Lead to radical separations of subject and object or the call for the DEATH of the subject itself. A theory of Anti-culture will be developed that must be placed alongside cultural explanations; one that QUESTIONS the ground of Anthropology proper and asks it to go beyond its facile acceptance of a rather Eurocentric, cultural relativity that seals off one mind from another and the individual from itself! Relativity is NOTHING NEW!